


Origins

by Shi_Toyu



Series: The FrostIron Collection [11]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Iron Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Origin Story, BAMF Tony Stark, Evil Tony Stark, Gen, Protective Rhodey, mentions of violence against a child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-18
Updated: 2014-11-18
Packaged: 2018-02-26 04:12:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2637602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shi_Toyu/pseuds/Shi_Toyu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are so many paths each life can take...The world was very lucky that Tony Stark had taken the path to become a better person, to become a hero. It would have been so easy for him to slip into the role of a villain, or even just a world-conqueror. Just a little character study of an alternative background that would have led him down a different path.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Origins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HarleyDeadpool](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarleyDeadpool/gifts).



> Sorry, not actually a FrostIron, but this is kind of like a set up for what led to the Tony I wrote for a few of the other Evil!Tony prompt fics. I hope you enjoy reading it none the less.

Tony Stark had never had an easy life, no matter what the tabloid or the idiots of the general population seemed to think. Sure, he had money. He'd grown up with servants willing to do just about anything at his beck and call. That didn't mean that his life was easy, not by any means.

Howard and Maria hadn't been ready for a child, he didn't think. They never would have been ready. So they tried to shove their newly arrived, unwanted burden off on the wait staff of the manor. The less they saw of their son, the better. Maria, at least, might have had an excuse. She'd been on medication for longer than Tony could remember. Even when she was physically present, she wasn't really there.

Howard, though, Howard was a drunk, and a belligerent one. He didn't really care who was in his presence once he'd had a few too many. He was more than happy to yell at any and all of them, family, staff, or colleague. The problem was that he always had a few too many by the time Tony was old enough to understand what was going on.

Tony was an impressive child, as anyone who wasn't his parent would tell you. There wasn't a single person who could talk to him for more than a few minutes and walk away not knowing that he was brilliant. He built his first circuit board at an age when most children were still learning how to form sentences. It took him no time at all to get noticed by the teachers at school.

He moved through grades like they were water, tearing through the material and learning at a pace that amazed his instructors, but never the two people he wanted to prove himself to the most. The continued rejection, the stubborn way his father would ignore him and push him aside, only led to Tony becoming more determined and more focused on his studies.

With each new peer-group he encountered, the age gap grew. It always started out the same. The girls would coo over him for the first few days, calling him adorable and treating him more like a pet than a person, and the boys would roll their eyes and scoff. Then Tony would get caught up on the material, match his peers' knowledge, and surpass it by leaps and bounds. The amusement at his presence turned to jealousy and dislike. If he stuck around long enough, that dislike would turn to hate.

The majority of his peers weren't about to do anything drastic to someone so much younger than themselves, but that didn't mean that every once in a while 'accidents' didn't happen. Tony's main caretaker, Jarvis, was obviously concerned, but there wasn't much he could do about it. In time, Tony learned how to grit his teeth and take it, whatever 'it' happened to be that go round.

Eventually, he stopped thinking 'It can't get any worse than this' because it always, always got worse. So instead of focusing on the living beings that surrounded him, Tony focused on his machines, his lines of code and his designs for future inventions. He gave them everything he had so there was nothing left over.

Tony felt very comfortable in saying that there were only two people in his life that actually cared about him. One was Jarvis, who had practically raised him and was more of a father figure than anyone else in Tony's young life. The other was Howard's business partner, Obadiah Stane. Obie had been around Tony's entire life, too, though he'd been farther away than Jarvis.

Obie would always bring Tony a piece of candy or some small treat whenever he came to the house and always had a kind word ready as he ruffled the boy's hair. Howard would scowl and bluster about Stane spoiling the boy, but that never seemed to stop him. It was to Obie that Tony showed his designs for future Stark Industries weapons and the older man always lavished him with praise for the work he had done. Every once in a while he would even take one of the works to Howard and get it sent off to the R&D department. They couldn't tell anyone they were Tony's designs, of course, but they both knew and that was what mattered.

Tony had just graduated high school when Jarvis was asked, told, to leave the Stark household. He'd stepped between Howard and a house maid before Howard could strike her and it had infuriated the businessman to no end. He was told never to contact a member of the Stark family again. Both Jarvis and his things were gone within the hour. Tony didn't even find out until the next day.

Three weeks later he was starting his summer classes at MIT and discovered that his life there was going to be even worse than it had ever been before. It was the first time in his life Tony actually felt challenged by his work load, even though he still understood it far better than most of his classmates. It was also some of the largest age gaps he'd experienced among his peer group. Some of the people he went to school with were 12 years older than himself, or more!

The freshmen weren't so bad. He could handle them. With many as young as 18, it wasn't any more of a difference than he'd experienced before. It was the older students, the ones who were seniors or who were going for their doctorates that posed the biggest problem. They were rowdy. They got drunk. And most of them had poor enough judgment that they didn't much mind roughing up a mouthy 14 year old.

There was no one at MIT for him to reach out to. Jarvis was gone, Obie was too far away, and the school itself didn't have the systems in place to deal with a 14 year old student. The only reason he even got in was because of his brilliance and the fact that he was Howard Stark's son. And Tony knew himself, knew he'd learned bad habits from his father when it came to testing the patience of others, but that didn't mean he could stop himself either.

By the time Tony hit the Fall semester, he'd broken three bones. Luckily, it was at that time when he met a junior named James Rhodes. Rhodes wasn't a huge guy, but he was big, big enough to stand beside Tony and make others think twice about picking on him. Plus, miracle of miracles, he didn't seem to mind that Tony was so much smarter than he was. He turned to Tony for help on his projects and homework more often than he did his teachers.

Rhodey had three younger siblings, he explained once when Tony asked why he bothered to look after the younger boy. Tony wasn't nearly as annoying as they were, but he did remind James of them. His little sister, especially, had problems with bullying at her school and if James couldn't be there to stop them, at least he could be there for Tony.

After that, life started to get better. Rhodey wasn't really much one for frat parties and wild drinking, so it kept Tony farther away from those situations, too. Rhodey had other friends, as well, and he called on them to keep an eye out for his little buddy whenever he couldn't. It made Tony feel protected, secure. It also taught him about the power of alliances, and how the right ones could change your life.

Tony began reading up on a lot of psychology, focusing on how hierarchies were formed and how to get people to do what you wanted. It started after a conversation with Rhodey's latest girlfriend who was studying to be a therapist. It didn't take long for Tony to soak up the information. He'd always been a fast learner and this was something he felt he desperately needed to know.

After that, he started watching people, paying attention to how they interacted with each other. He figured out who had the power, who had the most friends, who would be the most useful in which situation. It was fascinating.

Then came the next portion of his plan, where he implemented that knowledge. He insinuated himself into the circle of the head of the most popular fraternity on campus, helping him pass a class that he would have otherwise failed. He also used his dad's credit card to order them a shit-ton of booze and live band, a good one, for their next party. It became an unspoken rule around campus that anyone who messed with Tony Stark messed with Bi Kappa Pheta.

Next came the Robotics Team, which Tony joined and carried all the way through the world championship, designing his first AI along the way. It was one of the world's most advanced, despite Tony's loving name for it of Dum-E. The next year, Tony had secured his spot as the Captain of MIT's most successful and popular team. Things became a bit more complicated when he had to up the stakes for the Administration, though.

It was child's play to hack into his father's PA's email and send a note to the school saying that Howard wanted to donate the money for a new wing. It was much, much harder to cover up the donation from Howard with some creative accounting. Luckily, through more hacking and false emails, Tony managed to keep the SI accountants from getting too alarmed and running to his father. If no one told Howard, he'd never notice.

Rhodey had watched it all with fascination, even helping Tony here and there by playing a part or getting him in touch with the right people. By the time he was done, Rhodey was just looking around himself and staring in wonder. He shot Tony a wide-eyed look that was accompanied by a smile and a comment that Tony would remember for the rest of his life.

"Damn, Tones, you're gonna rule the world, aren't you?"

Before that moment, Tony had never really thought of the future past trying to make his father proud and one day taking over Stark Industries. With that one statement, though, that off-hand comment by a friend, it was like a whole new realm of possibilities opened up in front of him. For the first time in his life he knew exactly what he wanted, and he wanted it for himself, not his father.

So, once again, he started to watch, started to learn. But now the stage was bigger and there were a lot more players involved. He watched the politicians, the businessmen, the news anchors. He started forming alliances early, taking a note from his financing class about compound interest. An investment now would pay off so much more in the future.

His father didn't even notice, of course, but Obie did. As always, he reached out to Tony to give him a helping hand. He introduced Tony to the right people, pointed him in the right direction when he wasn't sure which way to go, and was always there to give a good piece of advice.

When Howard died, it was Obie who picked up the alcohol-soaked pieces of Tony's life. He fit them back together and got Tony back to work. He took the reins of SI while Tony drowned himself in blueprint after blueprint for new weapons. It wasn't until he turned 21 that he really actually stepped into his role as CEO with Obie at his side.

For a while, running the company and coming out with new products distracted him from his end goal. There just weren't enough hours in the day for everything to fit. Eventually, Tony realized that he was going to have to reprioritize. He stepped back from the business a bit, just a touch, and let Obie see to that sort of thing. He trusted Obie implicitly, after all.

Then Afghanistan happened, and Tony's entire life changed again. Everything he'd believed was turned upside down and, to top it off, the man he trusted most in his life had betrayed him. The funny thing was, when Yinsen had told him who put the hit out on him, he almost hadn't believed it. Then the pieces started to slot into place and he figured out that he really should have seen this coming.

Three months later he was back in the US, and he wasn't the same man who'd left it. His eyes were hard and his gaze was sharp. He still smiled for the media, for those who needed to see it, but he didn't feel it inside. His first goal was to kill the man who'd put him through so much pain…His second one was to make sure it could never happened again.


End file.
